Where Your Taxes Go: 34

A statue of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has been removed from a prominent location by the authorities here barely 45 days after she unveiled it, officials said. She wants a bigger statue of herself in its place.

[…]

Officials said Mayawati was not happy with the quality of the sculpture. She had also expressed her displeasure over the fact that it was smaller than the statue of her political mentor Kanshi Ram.

Now there’ll be anti-incumbency in the next election and Mulayam Singh Yadav will take over and want an even bigger statue than Mayawati’s, and then Mayawati will come back and want one size bigger, and so on until some low-cost airline’s airplane crashes into Mayawati’s nose and there are enquiries and Rajesh Talwar is blamed for that also. I love my India.

(Link via email from Ravikiran. Related posts on taxes in UP: 1, 2. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)

Amit Varma is a writer and podcaster based in Mumbai. He has been a journalist since 2001, and won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2007 and 2015. He writes the blog India Uncut and hosts the weekly podcast, The Seen and the Unseen.